Gözde Güran (Georgetown University)

Markets in Conflict: Trust Networks and Wartime Exchange in Syrian Hawala

How do markets emerge and expand in the midst of conflict? I explore this question by examining the market for hawala –peer-to-peer money transfers– during Syria’s civil war. Despite major disruptions and high risks stemming from the conflict, hawala networks have not only survived but effectively met the tremendous demand for money transfers, providing a vital and reliable service to the world’s largest refugee community, to NGOs funding aid programs, and to traders moving goods across borders. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Syrian brokers in Lebanon and Turkey, I argue that hawala’s scope and effectiveness can be traced to conflict dynamics, which simultaneously disrupt and foster diverse forms of trust. Re-constructing two hawala networks – one based out of Istanbul and one based out of Beirut – I specify how these distinct trust relations fueled market cooperation across local and ethnic boundaries. I further show how brokers, in bridging these trust networks, developed organizational practices that standardized transactions and accounting systems across networks, generating stability and reliability at the macro-level of the market. In this sense, I propose that conflict dynamics do not only disrupt trust but can also institutionalize it, allowing for transactions at scale even in volatile and uncertain contexts.